Mobile

Time spent chasing promises to give online is better spent thanking actual donors.

With 51 percent of email now opened on a tablet or smartphone, nonprofits should redesign their e-newsletters as soon as possible. Long-standing e-newsletter design best practices such as a two- or three-column-fixed layout, 12-point font size and text-based links only are officially 51 percent less effective. Unless your nonprofit embraces responsive design or mobile-first design aesthetics, your stories and calls to action will go unread and untapped. If email is integral to your communications and fundraising strategy, redesigning your e-newsletter to make it mobile-compatible should be at the top of your to-do list.

Jan. 28, Michael Sabat, VP of business development at Mobile Commons, co-hosted a webinar with Dawn Bickett from Greenpeace USA and Lawrence Grodeska from Change.org. The webinar covered how nonprofits can use SMS campaigns to engage their supporters with mobile.

Watch the video below for mobile usage statistics, best practices for integrating mobile into campaigns, and examples of past and ongoing campaigns from Greenpeace USA and other large nonprofit organizations.

More than 50 percent of all emails will be opened via a mobile devices in 2014. Here are six strategies to help your nonprofit cater to this sweeping landscape, according to Mike Snusz of npENGAGE: 1. Decrease email width. 2. Increase text size. 3. Keep emails below 102KB. 4. Use short, engaging subject lines. 5. Use short paragraphs to keep attention. 6. Understand what your emails look like.

While text-to-give was an early, high-profile mobile-marketing success story, recent developments and the availability of other potentially more effective strategies could result in a shrinking role going forward. Last fall, the major wireless carriers stopped supporting premium SMS, but not text-to-give programs for nonprofits and political campaigns. However, the upheaval and uncertainty caused by the news is just one reason nonprofits could begin looking beyond text-to-give.

At Artez Interactive, we wanted to know more about the impact of mobile devices on peer-to-peer, or “crowd-sourced,” fundraising campaigns. When individuals are motivated to ask their friends and social networks to donate to a cause, are those supporters using smartphones and tablets to help them fundraise? Similarly, are donors in peer-driven events giving through mobile-Web-enabled devices?

In this episode of Social Good, Tom Watson, president of CauseWired, a nonprofit consulting firm, and Kate Forristall, fund director at ArtsKC, a cultural group in Kansas City, Mo., discuss different types of mobile giving and explain how nonprofits can start raising money on smartphones and tablets without spending thousands of dollars to create apps.

Our donors cross media channel boundaries. They're really screwing up our neat, measurable, direct-response world. It's a pain, but it's something we must get used to and find ways of working with. One thing not to do is encourage donors to downgrade their involvement — or get lost entirely — by sending them to low-involvement channels. Here are two serious wrong turns that you shouldn't encourage donors to make: putting a QR code in direct mail and encouraging text-to-give on a website, e-mail or direct mail.

Can mobile bring supporters closer to local nonprofits and help them beat the out-of-state nonprofits that have muscled their way into their communities with brand and money? I think it can. The key is your proximity to people. It matters. Plan your mobile strategy accordingly. Focus on social media. Embrace mobile search. Use responsive design. Adopt two strategies — one for smartphones and one for tablets.

At Artez Interactive, we track fundraising activity for millions of visitors to charity and nonprofit donation pages every year. We’ve noticed that for most organizations, the peak time of day for online donations is between 9 a.m. – 11 a.m. Mobile Web usage actually ramps up after work or school! Your supporters are primarily using smartphones and tablets at home while watching TV, listening to music, reading e-mails or browsing social networks. We’ve discovered that the most popular time for mobile Web donations is between 8 p.m. – 10 p.m.